The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Heard you've been sowing troubled seeds."

  "Doesn't sound like us," Blays said. "Must have been some other Blays."

  "Funny. I heard two young men from Narashtovik fell in love with the daughter of some mucky-muck teamonger. When they tried to abscond with the lady, the merchant objected, so they dumped a sack of tree-cobras in his room while he slept."

  "Definitely not us," Blays said. "Me, I'm promised to my one and only. And as for him," he said, jerking a thumb at Dante, "I don't think he even knows what a woman is."

  "Nonsense," Dante said. "They're the ones with the dresses and nice smells, aren't they?"

  Brant beckoned them inside. "Whatever the case, the whole deal wound up in some ripping nighttime brawl. Last I heard, King Moddegan sent a half dozen galleys upriver to put down the fighting."

  Over dinner, Dante gave the farmer a more accurate if censored version of events, and was happy to hear that not only had the Clan of the Golden Field ceased their banditry, but were suspected of having slain a crew of human highwaymen who'd begun attacking wagons themselves. Narashtovik's first payments had already arrived, too. In response, the farmers had dispatched their first load of grain to the Territories not two days ago.

  "Nice to know one thing in the world's going well," Dante said.

  "It's the best things have looked for us in years," Brant said. "If you could just get Moddegan and the norren to let go of each other's throats, we'd have to build you a statue."

  They rode on. Smoke hung on the western plains. At a bridge over a swift and noisy stream, Blays stopped to stock up on water and feed the horses. Dante picked through the reeds on the muddy banks and called to the nether hiding under the algae-slick stones. Shaping it into a black stylus, he folded his hands in his lap and traced his name into the muck. Nether lurked in the mud, too, as well as in the water that welled up in the letters of his name, pinpricks of darkness that he pooled in his palm. How could he speak to the soil? Make it move in tune with the nether it contained? Shadows rushed to his hands. He pounded the nether into the mud, splattering himself and the stream, obliterating his name.

  A hundred miles from Narashtovik, the black woods swallowed them up. Cally raised Dante on the loon and told him to hurry home. He wouldn't explain why. Dante resumed at a gallop. They reached the city in two days. Cold spring rains battered the rooftops, swirling the streets into a slurry of horse dung and mud. Men ran from doorways with their hoods pulled tight over their heads. Atop the Pridegate, guards watched Dante pass; they were as still as the rooftop gargoyles, rain ticking on their metal helmets. Compared to the ebullience of Thaws, the streets were desolate, tense, a place to be fled rather than enjoyed.

  At the gates of the Sealed Citadel, Dante pulled back his hood and called out his name. A guard leaned over the battlements and disappeared inside the gatetower. The portcullis cranked into the walls with a cacophony of clunks and shrieks. A footman splashed across the courtyard. Cally was waiting.

  Inside the keep, Dante shed his sopping cloak and jogged up the stairs, Blays behind him. Cally sat behind his desk, tapping the blunt end of a quill into a blob of ink spilled on the surface of the dark wood. He nodded at them without looking up. His eyes were sunken, ringed with wine-dark circles. His white hair lay flat against his head. Blue veins traced his unusually pale face, as if he'd already joined Arawn in the other world where sunlight was a stranger, left to wander endless fields under the silver of the stars.

  "You got here quick." His voice was as flat as his hair. "That's good."

  Blays rested his hand on the hilt of his sword. "Either something's wrong or you're starting to show your age. Since you haven't crumbled into a pile of dust, I'm guessing the former."

  Cally smiled wryly at the spilled ink. "Is it that easy to tell?"

  "Oh, no. Only if you've got eyes."

  Cally dropped the quill and steepled his fingers against his chin. "There was another riot in Dollendun. Moddegan's troops marched across the river to put it down. They did. They burned down half the norren quarter, too."

  "Are you kidding me?" Dante said.

  "The clans have gone berserk. At last count, 23 had rejected the treaty. The chieftain of the Clan of Twinstreams actually shoved his copy up his own ass just so he could shit it back out."

  Dante pushed his fist to his forehead. "I'm guessing Moddegan didn't lay down his crown and do the apology dance."

  Cally gazed at the congealing ink. "I haven't received the official announcement yet. But rumor, as always, outraces the sun. The clans have been outlawed. Any norren who resists the commands of Gaskan soldiers, lords, or officials elected or appointed is to be seized as property of the crown. Or killed without penalty." Cally looked up, impossibly old. "It's been decided. He's going to war."

  "Well shit," Blays said.

  "You're the one who's been saying this could happen all along," Dante said. "Or was I getting you mixed up with some other 120-year-old head of the Council of the Sealed Citadel of Narashtovik?"

  The stormheads of Cally's brows collided. "Yes, but among the manifold risks and rewards of supporting the norren, early war was literally the worst outcome. It's hardly fair."

  "Fair?" Dane laughed. "Even if this was our worst nightmare, I assume you planned for it."

  "That doesn't mean I have good plans. When the most powerful man in the known world decides to come stamp you into paste, there's not a whole lot planning can do for you."

  "You always have options," Dante said. "You can always fight back."

  Cally rolled his eyed, mustache twitching. "You can leap off a cliff, too, but it won't get you any closer to the moon."

  "Let's assume we've only got a few months left to our tragically brief lives," Blays said. "What's going to be the most fun for us to do in the meantime?"

  A smile fought through the thicket of the old man's beard. "Okay. Fighting back."

  Blays thrust up his fist. "So let's take a cue from the norren, stuff that treaty right up our ass, and shit it back out!"

  "We're not doing that."

  "Then at least let us go drive those red-shirted sons of bitches out of the Norren Territories."

  "The Council's going to hate this," Cally smiled. "Brace yourselves for shouting."

  He scheduled the meeting for four days later. In the meantime, he dispatched riders to recall Olivander from the villages of the eastern foothills, where he was running headcounts on men of fighting age, and to fetch Kav from his estate on the northwest shores. The rains continued, tumbling from the tight ceiling of clouds. Sometimes it poured down in great seaside squalls, solid sheets of water that flushed down the hills and flooded the basement of the barracks. At other times, the rain descended in a dewy mist, glomming Dante's eyelashes and slicking the cobbles. It was in such a rain that Cally insisted on taking Dante to the graveyard.

  Most of the graves on the northern hill were centuries old. A scant handful were adorned with the pine boughs marking the anniversary of their occupant's passage. Moss clung to stone markers. Some of the tomb-pillars had toppled, lying cracked in the weeds. Cally passed Larrimore's marker, clean and white. Damp grass soaked the legs of Dante's pants. His cloak hung heavy and damp from his shoulders. His hands were as frigid as the dead.

  "Are we scouting your future resting place?" Dante slicked rain from his eyes. "Or have you decided you'd rather die by a cold than a sword?"

  Cally glanced over his shoulder, his beard as disheveled as a dog after it crawls from a lake and gives its first shake. "This is for your benefit. You seem incapable of learning in civilized settings, so I thought I'd return our classroom to the site of your greatest success."

  "This is another lesson? I hope it's more useful than your last one."

  "If a sponge fails to absorb a puddle, you don't blame the puddle."

  "That's assuming the puddle is made of something that can be absorbed rather than something thick and intransigent and altogether muddy."

  "Odd you should
say that." Cally stopped in front of a rain-churned flat of dirt and grass. "Mud is precisely what we're about to dive into."

  Dante frowned at the grave-studded field. "I hope you're still speaking metaphorically."

  "Honestly, I'm not sure." With some difficulty, the old man knelt in the grass, splaying his hand into the muck. "Let's see if we can get this to move."

  "I was trying that the whole trip back here. Nothing came of it except a few dead ants."

  "That's because you are stubborn, and occasionally stupid." Cally squinted at the sloppy ground. "My theory is that mud, being muddy, will be easier to move than rock, what with its rockiness. Yet we should think of both when we think of how to move either. The commonalities will allow us to stab neatly at the heart instead of flailing in the dark."

  Dante knelt beside him, rain soaking into the knees of his pants. "They're both nonliving substances."

  "But do we know they're pure of life? What if these fine grains include bits of bone? What if the water that made this dirt mud once passed through a bear's bladder or a goat's veins?"

  Dante paused with his hand halfway to the mud. "Then this is a very disgusting world we live in."

  "Few things have ever been only themselves. This is part of what I meant to impart to you about cycles. In a way, all the world is Arawn's mill, grinding old into new in a ceaseless turn."

  "If it's all the same substance, does that mean the rock is the nether and the nether is the rock?"

  Cally cocked his rain-sodden head, staring into the brown sludge as if Dante had just swept it aside to reveal a cache of rubies. He shook his head sharply. "No. We'd feel it. But that's good thinking. What else?"

  Absently, Dante picked up a twig and began drawing a bunny in the mud. He stopped with the second ear half-sketched. "What if there is no stick?"

  "You're beginning to talk like me. I don't like it."

  "To draw a rabbit, I have to use this stick." He held it up, mud clumped around its tip. "If I want to knock down one of those grave-pillars, I have to call the nether to me, shape it, and send it slamming into the rock. What if I found a way to throw out the stick?"

  Cally's eyes slitted. He snatched away the stick and poked at the wet soil. "Now that is an idea."

  Dante burrowed his focus into the mud, plumbing it for drops and trickles of shadows. He grabbed these up and tried to shake them like a dog shakes a squirrel. Cally smacked him in the side of the head just hard enough to dislodge his hold on them.

  "What the hell was that for?" Dante said, rubbing his head through his hood.

  "Don't just trample in like a puppy that's caught its first whiff of cheese. That's your whole problem. Look."

  Cally's eyelids drooped. His eyes became as cloudy as the rain pooling in the dirt. Dante looked, too. Shadows webbed the mud, infesting it, inhabiting it, embedded within and containing it, diffusing it like cream stirred in tea, yet as separate from it as the planks of a wracked ship are from the swirl of a maelstrom. He didn't touch the nether, except to trace it with his mental fingers. He simply watched, looked, and listened.

  After a full hour, Cally unfolded his legs with a grunt. He stood and stretched and flapped his rain-soaked cloak. "Well, I suppose that's enough of that. Try to work this out though, won't you? You could stroll across the Territories founding new forts with a snap of your fingers."

  "Why don't you figure it out?" Dante shivered. "You're supposed to be the master."

  "Yes, and the main perk of being the master is making your apprentices do your work for you."

  The old man strode down the hill, stiff from the cold. The upcoming meeting of the Council was entirely Cally's business, leaving Dante with no immediate responsibilities for the first time since Thaws. He spent most of the following days watching the dirt. Twice, he tried to move it, but with the nether embedded in solid soil rather than collected and shaped in his hands, it was like trying to push a wall. Perhaps it was even more like trying to push a mountain.

  The rains came and went. So did the riders, passing through the Citadel gates with news from the outlands and heartlands. Several clans had begun organized raids on the human border towns. Casualties had so far been light: a few soldiers and guards, a couple norren warriors. The first of Moddegan's conscripts—four hundred men from the Happark lowlands—were said to be inbound as an emergency stopgap against the clans.

  At the pub, Blays nodded at the news. "That'll keep the local taverns in business. Zero of those men are going to step outside whatever town they're parked in."

  "Think so?" Dante said.

  "For certain," Lira said. "It'll be weeks before they have the strength to start striking out in force. It could be months."

  Dante frowned. "Well, that's not how I would do it. The clans rarely number more than fifty people. If I were commanding the border troops, I would split them into three forces—150 to guard whatever city's at greatest risk, 150 ranging far afield to keep the clans scrambling, and the remaining hundred troops on regular sweeps between their base in town and the neighboring regions. This third force could reinforce the rangers when called for, too."

  "Fiendishly strategic," Blays said. "Unless the norren decide one clan plus one clan equals all your men are dead."

  "So you'd just sit in town and twiddle your thumbs?"

  "Do I look like a coward?

  "I can't tell with your back turned like that."

  Blays snorted. "Moddegan doesn't need any bold stratagems and derring-do. Do you know how huge his empire is? He can just advance town by town, county by county, hill by hill. The same way Mourn plays Nulladoon. The same way time decays us all to empty dirt."

  "That's a bit dark," Dante said.

  Blays took a long pull of his palebrown, a spring blend of spiced rum and citrusy wheat beer. "You've spent enough time with the clans, Mourn. Do you really think a few scattered tribes can do anything to stop an army of 20,000 men?"

  Mourn rolled his mug between his hairy hands. "That question is dishonest. If all you do is compare a small number to a big number, the small number will never be the favorite."

  "But that's all it is," Blays said. "A numbers game. They've got them, we don't."

  Dante set down his mug, arranging it so the handle faced him perfectly. "What about what you told Cally the other day? That we had to fight back?"

  "Of course we'll fight back. But that won't mean we'll win."

  The table went silent. The smell of roasted lamb hung in the air, greasy and savory, undershot by boiled carrots and garlic and onions. Men murmured, mugs clunking. Their grim tones and slow words echoed Blays' mood.

  "Are you all right?" Dante said.

  Blays gazed out the smeary window to the street, which was nearly pitch black other than the rain gleaming in deep pools. "I just wonder if we've done the right thing. We do these things, and at the time they look right, but you come home and you put them together and somehow they've added up to this bullshit war. If that's the result of all those good decisions, maybe they weren't so good in the first place."

  "But they would look different if Moddegan had responded different," Mourn said. "If he only responds with badness, our decisions will look like wrongness no matter what we do."

  "That's the truth right there." Lira gripped Blays' wrist. "You have to do what your heart and head tell you is best. No matter how the world might lash back. If you don't do what you know is right, how can right ever happen?"

  Dante kept his peace. That wasn't quite how he saw it—if getting eaten by a bear struck you as unfair, then perhaps you should keep your hands off a mother's cubs—but the discussion had already moved into the saferoom of platitudes. Blays drained his cup, plunked it down, and walked to the bar without a word. Dante scuffed his boots across the gritty floor, then ran his mind across the dirt there, seeking out the pricks of shadows contained within the grains.

  Mourn nodded at the bar. "I think he is in trouble."

  "He'll be fine," Dante said absently. "Ever
yone has moments of shadow."

  "And Blays' are about to manifest in the punching of that man."

  Dante twisted in his chair. At the bar, Blays faced down a man whose fists and mouth were bunched in anger. The man stepped forward, shoulders rolling beneath his deer-fur coat, throwing Blays into his shadow. His shoulders were those of a smith or a woodcutter: a man who spent all day swinging something heavy and metal.

  Blays smiled, swaying. "Is this how you met your wife? Who can say no after they've been beaten into sleep?"

  The man cocked his fist and threw a looping right hook. Blays stepped inside it, flicking his left wrist along the man's incoming arm to take control of the punch. In the same motion, he turned his hips and straightened up on his bent knees, driving a hard uppercut straight into the man's advancing chin. His teeth clicked so hard Dante winced.

  The man reeled backwards like gravity had just turned sidelong. He banged into the chairs behind him, knocking another man to the ground with a yelp. A mug shattered. The man hung there from the chairs, muttering to himself, eyes fluttering. Blays grabbed the downed man's drink and gulped it down. Two men broke through the pressing onlookers. Like their half-conscious friend, they too had the hard-hewn arms of woodcutters.

  Blays flipped the empty mug at their feet. "Back the fuck off or join him on the floor."

  Mourn plowed up to the bar, Lira and Dante behind him. The taller of the woodcutters leaned toward Blays.

  "Apologize. Do it good enough, and I won't take your jaw away."

  "None of that is going to happen," Mourn said, dropping his voice even lower than its typical rumble of falling rocks.

  The two men turned. They tipped back their heads to meet Mourn's eyes. The fight fled from their faces.

  "What's this?" the man said. "Start up trouble, then send in your slave to bail you out?"

  "Slaves aren't allowed to strike citizens." Mourn advanced, broad-bowed as a war galley. "I am not a slave."

  Dante wedged his way between them, dwarfed on all sides. "It's time to stop doing dumb things."